I’m a Senior Analyst in the Office of Research and Analytics at the New York City Administration for Children’s Services. I work on a team that generates outcome measures and performance indicators for investigations of child abuse and neglect from internal administrative databases. I am working to create an automated and reproducible workflow to query our databases, aggregate and summarize metrics, and create HTML and PDF dashboards, reports, and presentations from the data. Our team also collaborates with managers of frontline child protection staff to interpret this data in order to create actionable quality improvement plans and assess the impact of these plans.

I have an academic background in Sociology and Geography, with a focus on statistical modeling, spatial data analysis, and program evaluation. I like using the R programmng language. I’m currently developing an R package—nycgeo—that contains spatial data files for various geographic and administrative boundaries in New York City as well as tools for working with NYC geographic data. I’m also a contributor to the tidycensus package.

Before I began working at ACS, I spent five years recording oral histories with StoryCorps and helped to open a butcher shop and salumeria called Ends Meat. I received my B.A. in American Studies from Columbia University in 2006 and my M.S. in Applied Social Research from Hunter College in 2018. Check out my resume for more details.

I live in Brooklyn, NY with my wife, Jaime, daughter, Maya, and cats, Isabella, Chuck, and Walter. Get in touch at mfherman@gmail.com.